DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Spun-yarn and Spindrift" by Norah M. Holland. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

Reproduction of the original: Spun-Yarn and Spindrift by Norah M. Holland

Why do we often teach English poetic meter by the Greek terms iamb and trochee? How is our understanding of English meter influenced by the history of England's sense of itself in the nineteenth century? Not an old-fashioned approach to poetry, but a dynamic, contested, and inherently nontraditional field, "English meter" concerned issues of personal and national identity, class, education, patriotism, militarism, and the development of English literature as a discipline. The Rise and Fall of Meter tells the unknown story of English meter from the late eighteenth century until just after World War I. Uncovering a vast and unexplored archive in the history of poetics, Meredith Martin shows that the history of prosody is tied to the ways Victorian England argued about its national identity. Gerard Manley Hopkins, Coventry Patmore, and Robert Bridges used meter to negotiate their relationship to England and the English language; George Saintsbury, Matthew Arnold, and Henry Newbolt worried about the rise of one metrical model among multiple competitors. The pressure to conform to a stable model, however, produced reactionary misunderstandings of English meter and the culture it stood for. This unstable relationship to poetic form influenced the prose and poems of Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and Alice Meynell. A significant intervention in literary history, this book argues that our contemporary understanding of the rise of modernist poetic form was crucially bound to narratives of English national culture.

"The Great War in Verse and Prose" is a comprehensive anthology compiled by various authors, offering a diverse collection of literary works that reflect the experiences, emotions, and perspectives of individuals affected by World War I. This anthology captures the multifaceted nature of the conflict through a combination of poetry, prose, letters, and other written forms. Spanning different genres and styles, the selections in "The Great War in Verse and Prose" provide readers with a panoramic view of the war's impact on soldiers, civilians, and societies across the globe. From patriotic fervor to disillusionment, from the horror of the trenches to the resilience of the human spirit, the anthology encompasses a wide range of themes and emotions associated with the war. Through the voices of poets, novelists, journalists, and ordinary individuals, "The Great War in Verse and Prose" offers poignant insights into the social, cultural, and psychological dimensions of World War I. By juxtaposing different literary forms and perspectives, the anthology invites readers to engage with the complexities of war and its enduring legacy on humanity.

The average contemporary English speaker knows 50,000 words. Yet stripped down to its origins, this apparently huge vocabulary is in reality much smaller, derived from Latin, French and the Germanic languages. It is estimated that every year, 800 neologisms are added to the English language: acronyms (nimby), blended words (motel), and those taken from foreign languages (savoir-faire). Laid out in an A-Z format with detailed cross references, and written in a style that is both authoritative and accessible, Word Origins is a valuable historical guide to the English language.